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Good news: There are a couple of options that are starting to suck less than before.

RadRails is based on the Eclipse platform and is only at version 0.3 but it's coming along nicely as a Rails IDE.

Arachno Ruby from Scriptolutions is fairly well developed for a 0.6 product, but I have my doubts about a company that was developing PHP/Python tools just a few months ago and stops all development on those to work on a Ruby IDE just cause it's the hot new thing.

Finally, if you're a Dreamweaver type there is the Rubyweaver extension that's supposed to get you Ruby/Rails support, but it didn't work for me when I tried to install it under Dreamweaver 8 so your mileage may vary.

there's only one Ruby plugin for Eclipse, RubyEclipse which sucks badly IMHO. The overhead of loading Eclipse just to get basic syntax highlighting is not worth it, SciTE is much better(1 second flat loading time on my PC), its small, fast, low on resources/memory & has syntax highlighting, & its better than FreeRIDE as well, which is incidently written in Ruby, which is both heavy & slow!!

This version has ruby syntax highlighting, and if you are only working on a few files, this is a good free alternative.

Another thing I use is Notepad++. I'm not to mad on this as the interface is a bit clumsy and it doesn't like =begin =end comments. However I use this to edit rhtml templates and UltraEdit to edit solid code. You wanna use python syntax highlighing in Notepad++, and make sure all the fonts are set the same size.

I used to use jEdit when I worked on the Mac. Textmate is also good on the mac, but I perfered jedit due to the PC shortcut keys. Kate works well on Linux if you don't mind KDE.

abligatory plug for vim

I'm sorry, I have to insert the obligatory plug for vim at this point. Probably not what allot of web developers think of when looking for an IDE, but it has allot going for it.

1. will probably be installed on whatever box your running rails/ruby on by default
2. ruby syntax highlighting
3. good regular expression support
4. all the rest of the stuff that makes vim a good editor.

I apologize in advance for being a fanboy. It's really the regexp support that won me over in the end. Eventually I'll take the time to learn the scripting language built into the thing. I've also heard that there is a ruby scripting interface. I don't know much about it though, however that might be reason number 5, can be scripted using ruby.

why it ain't good? if you think that it lacking in function names, keywords etc to highlight, then you can add them. Take a look at the Ruby language file that I made for my WordPress plugin/GeSHi(attached). You can take the keywords/function names from it to start with(the are quite a number of them, not all, but not less either) & add them to the EditPlus language file!!

I am very happy with the early beta of Rad Ruby, it is small and efficient, has a neat yml interface for the database, lets you run queries straight from it too. It also has syntax highlighting and its a really nice fast app, its in java and I am assuming it is off of the eclipse project but its nice. It creates file structures for you and everything, no more terminal / command

I find SciTe most conformant with ruby's "simple is better" principle. The recent version 1.66 has a new improved ruby syntax highlighter.

Yeah but I can't stand having an Explorer window open as my project file viewer and I hate having 30 different SCiTE windows open when I'm working on a bunch of them. That and Verdana's a horrible code font

Yeah but I can't stand having an Explorer window open as my project file viewer and I hate having 30 different SCiTE windows open when I'm working on a bunch of them. That and Verdana's a horrible code font

I'm not going to advocate scite here, but the last two things are customizable and easy to change. The project window is a nice one to have, although with my custom "Open file at cursor" and "Find def at cursor" functions I don't miss it that much. I don't do any heavy ruby development though...